Adjectival attributes with the nouns "čovek", "žena", "muškarac" and "muž"

Abstract

The gender roles and gender order of a society are manifested but also established and maintained in the language of that society. By analysing adjectival attributes of the Serbian nouns čovek (man), žena (woman), muškarac (man/male) and muž (husband), this research aims to produce a systematic account of the representation of men and women in the Serbian language. The data analysed was obtained from the Corpus of Contemporary Serbian Language (SrpKor2013) in its advanced search mode. The initial research was done on a set of 85 adjectival words that were presumed to have different patterns and frequencies, and even meanings, in the role of attributive adjectives of the nouns under consideration. To ensure that the research yields an objective picture, the initial set was expanded to include all the adjectival words that in the corpus search results occurred at least 5 times before any form of at least one of the four nouns. The processing of the results included confirming the syntactic function and determining the meaning by cursory or detailed reading of the concordances, depending on the adjectival word, and then classifying the selected adjectival words to enable a clear representation of the data and make the analysis easier.